Search for people, departments, or email addresses.
Humanities Division
History of Consciousness Department
Graduate Student
History of Consciousness
Graduate
Fascism
Cultural Studies
Marxism
Humanities & Social Sciences Building
https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/9767447036?pwd=enZWZ0pQRVNLNHJwMStjRE9SZURNQT09
History Of Consciousness
I’m a scholar of communication and cultural studies working in social and political theory, Marxist philosophy, and the political economy of knowledge. In my research, I examine how people produce and reproduce the social relations through which they live, and how their collective power can become means of domination or resources for transforming those relations.
My research develops along two connected lines. In the first, I examine the relationship between capitalism and fascism. My dissertation is about how fascist politics reorganizes institutions, cultural forms, and coercive capacities already present within liberal-capitalist society. I ask how real injuries and fears become grounds for supporting more direct domination, and how political subordination can be experienced as collective power. My work on “exceptional media” identifies the communicative practices through which accounts of crisis become grounds for overriding ordinary standards of evidence, contestation, and protection. Drawing on German and Italian histories, I examine how financing, communications infrastructure, political organization, and violence enable this process without giving any single actor control over its outcome.
This research also informs Crisis and the California Ideology, which I’m coediting with Cara Greene and Kyle Proehl. The volume looks at California both as a historical place and as a globally influential ideal. Its authors investigate how promises of technological progress, personal freedom, and cultural experimentation become bound to capitalist accumulation, racial domination, militarism, and authoritarian politics.
The second line concerns scientific labor and the institutions of collective knowledge production. I founded the Sociology of Scientific Labor working group at UCSC, which brings together researchers across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. We examine how funding, commercialization, institutional hierarchy, and working conditions shape scientific inquiry. Alongside our reading group, we’re developing workers’ inquiries—interviews and ethnographic research with scientists and other research workers—and organizing an interdisciplinary conference on science under the Trump administration. In related collaborative work, I look at how alternative economic projects produce and share knowledge and build institutions through which participants can shape their conditions of life.
Across these projects, my interventions in Marxist theory concern abstraction, social reproduction, and the relationship between critique and political practice. In my work on the wage-form, I examine how the reproduction of human life becomes subordinated to the accumulation of capital. In engagements with systems theory and Western Marxism, I reconstruct Marx’s account of dynamic social forms to explain how practices that reproduce capitalism can also generate critical knowledge and capacities for changing it. Methodologically, I combine close theoretical interpretation with conjunctural analysis: examining how economic relations, political institutions, and cultural practices come together in particular historical situations.
I have a very sweet, interesting, fun, curious daughter named Jovie.
Fascism Studies; Communication and Cultural Studies; Social and Political Theory; Marxist Philosophy; Political Economy of Media and Knowledge
Capitalism and fascism; ideology and political mythology; media institutions and public authority; dialectical method and conjunctural analysis; value, the wage-form, and social reproduction; phenomenology, affect, and historical temporality; sociology and philosophy of science; collective knowledge production and political organization
My teaching interests include social and political theory, Marxist philosophy, communication and cultural studies, fascism and authoritarianism, aesthetics and film, and the history and philosophy of science. I emphasize close reading, clear argument, and the use of concepts to investigate concrete historical and political problems. At UCSC, I’ve taught What Is Communication? and Fascism and Film, and co-taught an independent study on the phenomenology and temporality of the transition to capitalism.
2026 History of Consciousness Outstanding Teaching Assistant
2026 History of Consciousness Summer Spring–Summer Travel and Research Grant
2025 Tribeca and History of Consciousness Summer Research Grant
2024 Tribeca and History of Consciousness Summer Research and Travel Grant
2023–2024 UCHRI Grant for The California Ideology Working Group
2023 Affiliated PhD Student at American University of Beirut
2023 Summer STARS Re-entry Scholarship
2023 History of Consciousness Travel Funding
2022–2023 UCHRI Grant for Alt-Right Media Literacy Series
2022 History of Consciousness Travel Funding
2022 Summer STARS Re-entry Scholarship
2022 Summer Graduate Dean’s Travel Grant
2022 History of Consciousness Summer Research Support
2021–2022 Regents Fellowship
2026 Presentation: “Corrupted Forms of Life: The Wage-Form, Metabolic Rift, and Social Morphology,” at Planetary Warscapes Ablaze: Imperial Mutations in Infernal Times, Historical Materialism London
2026 Panel discussant: “Beyond the Postcolony,” at Decolonization and the Left, UCSC Platypus Affiliated Society2026 “Revolutionary Stratigraphy: Temporal Sedimentation and Political Form in Revolution and Restoration,” at Revolution and Restoration: A Conversation, UCSC
2025 “Abstraction and Appearance: Lifshitz, Benjamin, and the Aesthetic Logic of Fascism,” at Resurgent Reaction: Marxist Strategies at the End of the Liberal Order, Historical Materialism London
2025 “Scientific Practice in Fascist Times: Beyond Capitalism’s Two Faces,” at 2nd International Symposium of Marxism & Sciences Journal, Romania
2025 “Fascist Epistemology: Abstract Materialities and Myths,” at Combating the Catastrophe, Historical Materialism Paris
2025 “Life, Death, and the Mythological Machine,” at Life and Death, Center for Research in Modern European Philosophy Graduate Conference (Kingston University, London)
2025 “Crisis, Preventive Counterrevolution, and Capitalist Media,” at Organizing in the Capitalocene, Historical Materialism Athens
2025 “Forget Critical Theory: A Critique of Modern Witnessing,” at Media Fields: Witnessing, UCSB
2024 “Capitalism and The Phenomenon of Mass Fear,” at Polycrisis across Divides, Historical Materialism Cluj-Napoca
2024 “Immediate Transcendence and Purifying Violence: On Surfer Fascism,” at California Ideology, UCSC
2024 “Fragmentation and Intensification: On the Liberal Dissolution of Authority and The Fascist Tragedy of Authority’s Simulacrum,” Authority and Its Discontents, Fides Quaerens at Villanova University
2023 “Fragmentation and Intensification: On the Capitalist Production of Fascist Culture” at Critical Humanities for the Liberal Arts, American University of Beirut
2023 “Modern Dialectical Intensification and The Capitalist Production of Far-Right Habitus” at Spatialities of the Right: Practices and Tactics of the Far-Right, American Association of Geographers Conference
2022 “Modern Dialectical Intensification and Fascist Compensation” at Culture and Theory in Reactionary Times, University of Minnesota
2022 “Fragmentation, Fascism, and the Grendel Academy” at The Spectre Haunting Academia: Understanding the Role of Academia in the Rise of the Far-Right, University of Heidelberg
Edited Volume
Forthcoming with Cara Greene and Kyle Proehl. Crisis and the California Ideology. Berlin: DeGruyter Brill, forthcoming.
Academic Articles
2027 “The Wage-Form as Crisis-Form: Value, Need, and the Practice of Social Mediation.” Problematique: Journal of Political Studies/Revue d’études politiques 17, forthcoming.
2027 “Revolutionary Stratigraphy: Temporal Sedimentation and Political Form in Revolution and Restoration.” Philosophy Today 71(3), forthcoming summer 2027.
2026 “Ouroboros, Part Two: ‘Western Marxism’ and Marx’s Theory of Dynamic Form.” Marxism & Sciences 9, forthcoming.
2026 “Exceptional Media in the Transition to Fascism.” forthcoming.
2026 “Spectacular Annihilation: On Contemporary Apocalyptic Aesthetics.” Mythos: Journal für Ästhetik 1(2): 112–21.
2026 “Ouroboros, Part One: Systems Theory and Marx.” Marxism & Sciences 8: 111–32.
Para-Academic Articles
2024 “Imane Khelif, Immediate Transcendence, and Fascism,” in Blue Labyrinths (https://bluelabyrinths.com/2024/09/10/imane-khelif-immediate-transcendence-and-fascism/)
2022 “The Conformist: Liberal Habitus in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit” in Judas, As botas de, (https://revista.judasasbotasde.com.br/332022/the-conformist-liberal-habitus-in-hegels-phenomenology-of-spirit/), Brasil
HISC 138: Fascism and Film
HISC 23: What is Communication?
This campus directory is the property of the University of California at Santa Cruz. To protect the privacy of individuals listed herein, in accordance with the State of California Information Practices Act, this directory may not be used, rented, distributed, or sold for commercial purposes. For more details, please see the university guidelines for assuring privacy of personal information in mailing lists and telephone directories. If you have any questions please contact the Information Technology Services.
